 Robert Lamb, I am the Senior Fellow and Director of the Program on Crisis Conflict and Cooperation at CSIS. Welcome to Wednesday and the launch of the 2014 Global Peace Index with the Institute for Economics and Peace. As you know, we've had quite an interesting year in 2013 and continuing into 2014. The Institute for Economics and Peace found – they cranked a lot of data and they found that of all the countries in the world, Georgia has done best in terms of improving its peacefulness. We can be reasonably happy about that. Of course, then Russia's relationship with Ukraine went a little bit south at the end of last year and continued going south this year. So a lot of Russia's neighbors I think are still a bit nervous about some of the internal dynamics. The Russians living within their borders and their relationship with Russia as well as the prospects for potential conflict in the future. The – Georgia and Ukraine are – I think they're good demonstrations of the fact that there is no guarantees for peace in the world. Russian governments have not consolidated peace in the past when there are still problems of corruption and authoritarian governance, when there are still difficult relations with their neighbors. And perhaps no country illustrates this better than South Sudan with just a few years ago, won its independence from Sudan with overwhelming support from the people of South Sudan. But then last year, of course, the country was marred by a massive civil war that caused South Sudan to fall most in the Global Peace Index last year. We know as well that Egypt, which again just a few years ago had overthrown a – it's a former authoritarian regime, held a democratic election, but then last year saw the overthrow of that government by the military again and further deterioration in prospects for democracy in the short term. Central African Republic, we barely even need to talk about good news there. There was a march towards the capital early last year. Significant human rights abuses leading up to that, significant violence since then and Syria, I'll say no more. So with that sobering, very, very brief overview of the top improver in peace last year and the five worst movers in terms of peace last year. Let me say on a somewhat sunnier note that the ability to analyze peace and conflict has been increasing over the last few years with growing availability of data, lots of talk of big data and the analytic capabilities to look at it. It's not entirely clear that we have really quite enough data aggregated at the right levels to really get to the details that we need. In particular, a lot of the countries I mentioned just now and many other countries where conflict is an issue are not cohesive states, so it doesn't always make sense to talk about single figures for entire countries and certainly things happen rapidly and so aggregating data at the annual level is also problematic. But we have the data that we have. Over time that data is going to continue to improve. We hope, I hope personally for more subnational data and particularly in a lot of countries that are often described as fragile. And the more data we have, the better the analysis we'll get. So today, the Institute for Economics and Peace releases a report that I think does just a wonderful job of pulling together as much of the data that exists in the world today and brings together some of the best minds in the world to figure out what sense can be made of it. We will be hearing from a number of people on the panel today to introduce the index and the methodology and then offer some discussion. So I am going to ask Aubrey Fox, the Executive Director of the Institute for Economics and Peace North America, to step up here and give the broader introduction and then we'll introduce the other speakers following that. Thanks. So thank you, Bob, and thanks to our great friends at CSIS who have been our stalwart supporters over the years of the Global Peace Index, I think something like seven or eight, seven of the eight Global Peace Index reports have been launched here at CSIS. So as Bob said, my name is Aubrey Fox and I'm the Executive Director of the Institute for Economics and Peace in the USA and I'm going to spend about 12 to 15 minutes giving you a broad overview of the results of this year's report. So a little bit about the Institute for Economics and Peace. We are an independent not-for-profit think tank dedicated to building a greater understanding of the key drivers and measures of peace and to identify the economic benefits that increased peacefulness can deliver. And we're based in Sydney, Australia, in New York, and in Oxford. In addition to the Global Peace Index, we release a number of other publications, most of which you probably can't read up on the screen, but just know that we do a variety of work both looking at individual countries and individual topics of interest such as a terrorism index that looks at terrorist incidents in countries around the world. So our agenda for my talk and my colleague David Hammond's talk is this. I'm going to give you an overview of our results from the 2014 Global Peace Index. I'm next actually going to talk about the seven-year trends in peace and some of the global costs of violence that we've calculated. Now I'm going to hand it to David to talk about an exciting new area that we've pioneered in this year's Global Peace Index, which is assessing country risk. What are some tools where we can predict which countries have the potential for falls and peace in coming years? Okay, so how do we define peace? I think I want to spend just a minute on this because it's an important issue. The first thing that we say is that to us peace is more than the absence of war. Peace is defined by the IAP as the absence of violence. And what that means is that we're moving away just from a focus on kind of traditional conflict between nations and war within nations to the everyday violence that people experience. And so it's much more an orientation around the actual experience, the lived experience of citizens around the world. So in addition to measuring the absence of violence, which is in a way defining what peace isn't, we have attempted to try to define what peace is. And so in addition to our Global Peace Index rankings, we run something called the Positive Peace Index, which looks at the underlying conditions of peaceful nations. So what are the properties of nations that apparently drive more peaceful conditions in those nations? So a few things about the Global Peace Index. As we mentioned, it's in its eighth year. We rank 162 countries, which is something like 99% of the world's population. We use 22 indicators. The work is developed by us, but in partnership both with a panel of international experts and using data collected and collated by the Economist Intelligence Unit. Here's a little look at the indicators that we use. Again, we have 22 indicators in total. Five of them look at measures of ongoing domestic and international conflict. So that's typically state conflict between countries and within countries. We also look at 10 measures of societal safety and security. Again, that's about the everyday lived experience of people who go through interpersonal violence, terrorist acts, homicides, and the number of people who are incarcerated in that country. And then finally, we include seven measures of militarization. So military expenditure, number of armed service personnel, and ease of access to small weapons. And so the Global Peace Index scores and rankings are the product of all of these 22 measures. Okay, so again, we are attempting to come up with a process that is legitimate and independent as possible. And so this describes the multiple levels of work that is done and put into the index itself. Okay, so here are our highlights. As Bob mentioned, what we record is a slight deterioration in the level of peace worldwide for the seventh year in a row. So we know that if you look at the full scale of the 20th and 21st century that peace in general has declined. But in the last seven years, sorry, peace has improved over the 20th and 21st century. But over the last seven years, we've seen a slight deterioration in peace. That deterioration is driven primarily by increases in terrorist activity, number of internal and external conflicts fought, the deaths from those internal conflicts, and the number of refugees and displaced people. We did find some improvements. So state repression, repression of its population, number of armed service personnel, and in the last year the number of homicides, although it should be said that over the seven-year period there has been actually a dramatic increase in the total number of homicides worldwide. So some highlights that look at individual countries. Syria has displaced Afghanistan as the world's least peaceful nation, perhaps not a surprise to people. But Syria has unfortunately plummeted in our Global Peace Index rankings. Iceland is the most peaceful nation in the world. Georgia has shown the largest improvement. South Sudan, the largest drop. Denmark and Austria are additional countries that are the most peaceful. And Europe is the most peaceful region of the world, South Asia the least peaceful. Here's a look at our 10 most peaceful countries. Our Global Peace Index scores are calculated between one and five, so lower is better. And so you see countries in our top 10. Here is our bottom 10. And I think one thing to point out here that is worrisome is that many of the countries on this list who have actually fallen in the last year. So what we're seeing is that the countries who are the least peaceful are falling faster, and the countries that are most peaceful are improving in their peace scores. So there is a kind of polarization at both ends of the scale. The most peaceful nations are getting more peaceful, the least peaceful nations are getting less peaceful. So these are risers and fallers from the last year. And as you can see, there are some very dramatic changes in our ranks. Just to pick out a couple of examples. Georgia rose 28 places, Mongolia 25 places. Egypt fell 31 places, and the Ukraine fell 30 places. So it's pretty dramatic to have such large increases and decreases from year to year. So what I just showed you were some changes from the last year. Now let's take a look at some seven-year trends in peace. We use three main domains with our indicators, and what we've found is that the largest decrease over the seven years are your safety and security scores. So these are the number of homicides within your country, interpersonal violence, and the like. And that's the major reason for the overall deterioration in the global peace scores. We found no change in militarization score. So there are, in some countries, countries are gradually demilitarizing, in some countries countries are increasing their expenditures on military, and it's a bit of a wash. And also a decline in peacefulness when you look at ongoing conflict. So some particularly worrisome trends over seven years, terrorist activity and homicide, have increased the most. So when we say deterioration, we're talking about a deterioration in peace. So how you would understand it is those things have gone up. Not all news is bad. So 53 countries have improved in their global peace index score while 103 countries have deteriorated. Greatest deterioration in the Middle East, North Africa, and the sub-Saharan African regions. Okay, so let's talk about deaths from terrorism for a moment. This is one of the trends from our report that we're most concerned with. We know that prior to 9-11, 38 countries suffered death from terrorism. Today we have 58 countries that are experiencing death from terrorism. We also know that prior to 9-11, you had something on the order of 2,500 deaths from terrorism every year. And now we're up to somewhere between 12 and 14,000. So we just had the news of the Nigeria World Cup viewing party terrorist incident yesterday. And so we live in a world of dispersed terrorist threats and a world where terrorist activity is increasing. This is a breakdown of individual countries and the amount of terrorist deaths they have experienced. Iraq, worryingly, is surged past the level of terrorist deaths that it experienced before the surge. So we are in a difficult situation there. You can also see problems occurring in countries like Afghanistan, Pakistan, Nigeria, and Syria. Although, again, there are 58 countries that have experienced at least one terrorism death. Global homicide rates. So again, we're not just looking at issues of war and peace, but common everyday violence happening every day. And what we show here is that the nature of being killed in violent circumstances has changed. And so in 2012, 437,000 people were killed across the world. And so the reality that everyday criminal violence has become a security issue I think is starting to set in amongst policymakers. Just to give you one example, in the conversations around what post-2015 goals the UN should focus on, there is now a debate about whether security and homicide rates should be an indicator, just like things like access to education and infant mortality are indicators. And in some ways, you could argue that security cuts across all of the indicators. In other words, that countries that experience crime and violence are unable to meet other human and social service goals because they are mired in violence. So I'm going to end just by talking for a few minutes about the global cost of violence. This is another mission of our organization, is not just to chronicle conflict and violence in the world, but to try to put a number on how much it costs to contain violence. So our calculation, that number of US $9.8 trillion to contain violence worldwide, counts all expenditures related in the attempt to prevent violence and the consequences of violence. And to me, this is a stunning number. I think we all know intuitively that it costs a lot to try to contain and prevent violence and that there are ancillary costs to violence, including impact on victims and society. I think putting it in this kind of context really makes the point strongly. And so we've come up with estimates for each of the 162 countries in the Global Peace Index. It allows for policymakers to really understand what not only the cost of the violence expenditure spending is, what benefits you receive and what are the opportunity costs. An investment in violence containment by its definition comes with the cost of not investing in something else. In coming up with our global cost of violence, we used 13 dimensions and we found that this number represents an increase of about 4% from 2013. This is how we break down the global cost of violence. So you can see that at the top of the list is military expenditure, but we also look at the total cost and toll of a homicide and internal security, and you can go down the list. So I'll end here before I hand it over to David. I want to just stop for a minute and talk about the 10 countries that spend the most of their gross domestic product on violence containment. I think we understand that the United States as the world's policemen and the country with the most incarcerated people, we have the U.S. as 5% of the population but 25% of the world's incarcerated population. It comes as no surprise that the U.S. spends a lot of money on violence containment, something on the order of $1.7 trillion. But I think one thing that our analysis does that's really important is that even countries that are not economic powerhouses are spending a lot of their GDP on violence containment. And I think we all understand that for a country like Honduras to spend 20% of their gross domestic product containing violence, that that is a very difficult position for a country to be in that is struggling with its own kind of larger picture of how do you provide for its population and how do you grow the economy in a sustainable way. And so I think what we want to avoid is a kind of vicious cycle where countries who experience high levels of violence are forced to invest in trying to get a hold of the problem but because they're spending so much money on it, it furthers their economic decline. And so ways to turn from a kind of vicious cycle into a more virtuous cycle, I think is in all our interests. So thank you very much. We'll have time for questions at the end, but I do want to hand it just right over to David if I can to talk about our risk analysis. Thanks very much, Aubrey. David Hammond is a research fellow at the Institute for Economics and Peace. They're resident math nerd. Welcome. Okay. Well, first of all, I'd just like to extend my thanks for hosting us here today. It's always a pleasure to be back in the U.S. My name is David Hammond, and I'm going to be briefly talking about the risk tool that is currently in development at the Institute for Economics and Peace. So in the next sort of 10 minutes, I'll go through some background research and concepts, some methodologies that we've used to implement those ideas, some results that we're getting and where we think and where we want this to go. All right, that is better. Okay. The risk work that we've done for this report is strongly based on, as Aubrey has already mentioned, observations of peaceful societies. So since 2007, the Institute for Economics and Peace has been calculating the Global Peace Index, which has allowed us to extract factors that are common among peaceful societies. The following framework, the Pillars of Peace, have been empirically derived from correlations with the GPI, and they explain what pillars are very strong in these peaceful societies. It's our way of thinking about positive peace, which Aubrey has already mentioned, but what positive peace is, is the attitudes, institutions and structures that create and sustain peaceful societies. So this framework is empirically derived, and we take a systems view approach. None of these pillars stand by themselves. They're all mutually reinforcing to create a virtuous cycle. The other thing to note about positive peace is it is very much in the long term. The change attitude, institutions and structures really takes commitment and investment to the sort of 5 to 10 year timeframe. So for instance, if you improve, say, education, then the benefits to society start being reaped when the recipients of that education start flowing into the workforce and progress into positions of influence. So because of that, there is a lagged payoff for investing in these. But what we're finding is that countries that do invest in these tend to be more resilient and do not sort of fall more easily into conflict. So the benefits are there. Just some very sort of high level economic benefits for improving peace. Countries in the past 20 years that have improved peace, the most on average have had higher GDP growth rates. And it's over 2%, which is quite a difference in economic terms. And we see the same trend for positive peace. So it's not just reducing violence, it's investing in human capital and the rest of the pillars. Countries that have done that the most in the past 20 years again have reaped the benefits economically. And finally, just another high level point. Countries that are more peaceful also have lower levels of inflation. So now there's many of these sort of benefits that we've found in our analysis, but there's three just very top level ones. And you can see if a country is, if it's improving its income growth and the economy is more stable, then the nation itself becomes more resilient and less prone to fall into conflict because there's less reasons to do so. So our overall vision of where, what we're trying to achieve with this work is really to take a risk and opportunity approach in our analysis. What we're trying to do is be able to identify countries that are improving their positive peace, and therefore in the long term may see the benefits that we've seen in the past for countries that have done so, but also have a look at risk as well. So identify countries that are not performing that well in positive peace and identify them early. So action can be taken if necessary. So how are we doing this? The way we're doing this is, and this is really the evolution of the research at the IEP to this point, we've started trying to understand and measure violence. From that we've derived pillars of peace and trying to understand positive peace within nations. And from that, we can start looking at the relationship between the two. And by understanding the relationship between the two, you can make an assessment of risk or opportunity within a country. So what we're finding is that countries that have large differentials between their positive peace and their actual peace tend to be less stable in their current positions. So what that means is in terms of the Global Peace Index and the Positive Peace Index, countries that do well on one but not on the other are prone to higher variability. And just to make that point, here's the relationship between the Global Peace Index and the Positive Peace Index. And you can see that the countries that do well on both, which are colored in blue, they're very closely grouped together. If you play this over time, they tend not to move. And even though, as Aubrey said, we're noticing that these countries are becoming more peaceful, in terms of global terms, the variability is very low. If you look at the other extreme, the countries in red, they're countries that score poorly in both measures. And as Aubrey said, as we've noticed, they are becoming less peaceful. Again, the variability in terms of big, massive changes in peace is relatively low. What we're seeing is that the countries in the middle of those two, this is where historically most of the movement has been. So for instance, if you take a country that is doing well on the Global Peace Index but not in the Positive Peace Index, what we're finding is they're less resilient in the event of a shock, whether it be natural, political, or civil unrest. They don't have the attitudes, institutions, and structures to be able to respond to that, to be able to resolve the shock, and to be able to repair quickly. So just to make that point, if we look back at 2008, at the data back then, and we have a look at the countries that had the biggest peace differential at that particular time, so these are the top 30 at the time, we see that only three in the period since have not deteriorated in peace. So how are we using this information? We've developed in preparation for the Global Peace Index 2014 a number of risk models, but we've focused on the report on two, which are the Positive Peace Deficit Model and the Like Country Model. The Positive Peace Deficit Model is basically what I've already explained, having a look at the peace differentials within a country and making a sort of educated guess as to the direction that that country will go. The Like Country Model builds on this but takes a historical perspective. It says for a particular country, what's been its historical range in peace, and then compares that to the historical range of peace of countries with similar positive peace. So countries with similar attitudes, institutions and structures, how have those countries fared in history, how has country A fared in history, and from that we combine those two to make a Bayesian inference calculation to assess the stability of its current position today. And so some of the results we're getting, again if we replay it from 2008, from 2008 to 2014, these are the top 10 countries with the largest deteriorations in peace. And you can see that using both the Positive Peace Deficit Model and the Like Country Model, we're picking up a lot of them. We're picking up a lot of the biggest fallers. There's a comparison to other indicators there, other prominent indicators. Now the point of that is not to say that these indicators are flawed, they do a very good job of what they're doing, which is capturing certain information at a particular point in time. The reason we show this is that we see that the value in this is that we're trying to build a forward-looking indicator, not just a summary of what's happening on the ground today. So if we play the analysis on data today, these are the 10 countries that the models are saying are highest at risk of deteriorating in their current levels of peace. So what does that mean? What we're not saying is that these countries are the countries that are going to erupt into violence tomorrow. That's not the point of this. The point of this is to say that these countries are actually performing quite well, given our understanding of Positive Peace. But if they would like to sustain and guarantee and mitigate the risk of deteriorating in peace, they want to start thinking about investing in Positive Peace today. So in summary, the purpose of this and the purpose of any risk tool, I mean I've got a sort of engineering background and we use the same process there. Any risk tool is not about eliminating risks. It's about being able to identify, prioritize, and mitigate risks. So what we're doing, and this is more detailed in the report, is we're combining this assessment of risk using Positive Peace and Negative Peace with our violence containment costs. And the point of that is that with that you can then estimate how much you can put a dollar value and how much a deterioration in peace would cost a particular country and then do a proper cost-benefit analysis of action versus inaction in that particular situation. And I think that's all I have to say about that. So thank you very much. Thanks very much. We have with us today three highly qualified discussants. Before we get to them, I want to mix it up just a little bit and ask a question of my colleagues from the Institute for Economics and Peace. Laos is a bit of an outlier in all of this. We've had conversations about this in the past. For 39 years, the country has been relatively peaceful ever since the Civil War ended in 1975. Highly authoritarian, extremely corrupt, single-party rule, very poor, terrible institutions, and yet pretty stable when it comes to peace. One could argue that given the underlying quality problems of the institutions that it would be there's a risk for peace. I wonder if you could just talk about that a little bit in terms of how you would analyze a country like that in the context of the risk analysis tool, mainly because that's one of the biggest outliers and if we can understand a bit how it might apply to that, we can understand a bit better how it can apply to some of the easier cases. Okay. Laos is a good example, but there are many countries that are like that improving over the past sort of recent years. Now, in terms of how we do it in the risk tool, which I'll answer that bit first, as I said, we look at the individual factors that have historically been present when a country has deteriorated a lot in peace. And because, as Bob has said, the institutions in Laos are very weak, in the presence of an external shock, it would be difficult for that country to respond. But in terms of the bigger picture, I think it's important to note that what we're doing here is really, as I said at the end, a methodology to identify, prioritize, and mitigate risks. So the analysis that we're doing is doing that first part. It's identifying the risk. To do a fuller analysis, you can then take whatever countries come out of that and do an in-country analysis. And so it's really about prioritizing where you invest your time to do research. Thank you. Now, I'll allow our discussions to decide whether they want to come up to the podium or remain seated. We're going to hear from Paul, Gary, and Alexandra in that order. Paul Stairs, as I'm sure all of you know, is a senior fellow and director of the Center for Preventive Action at the Council on Farm Relations. He almost needs no introduction if you care about conflict prevention or care about figuring out how the United States can tool itself or retool itself to do a better job at preventing conflict than the work of Paul Stairs is the work that you need to be following. So I will hand it over to you, sir. Thanks, Bob. That's very kind of you. We've taken an informal poll and decided to stay seated here. I want to thank the organizers of the conference today. I appreciate the opportunity to come out and talk on this issue. I also want to applaud the GPI and what it's trying to do. I think we all recognize, and I think Bob mentioned this, the outset, the importance of bringing greater rigor to the study of sources of conflict and moreover, the sources of peace. So I applaud any effort that tries to bring greater clarity to this. I don't have an awful lot of time here, so what I thought I would do is focus on what I think the report of the GPI tells us, where it's helpful, secondly, what it frankly doesn't tell us about the state of global peace and finish up with some brief comments on its utility, if you will, for policy analysis and policy prescription. So turning firstly to what it does tell us, I think, as others have mentioned, it confirms or supports the basic assessment about broad trends underway in the world today in terms of the level of contemporary conflict and the nature of conflict. There's very little in the way of any, frankly, great power conflict, no major interstate conflict underway in the world today. Most of the conflict, frankly, is civil, internal conflict, social violence, however you want to describe it. It also, I think, confirms what others have pointed out that there's been a leveling off in some of the positive trends of the last decade that we've seemed to have hit a trough in terms of broad trends in kinds of conflict, where they're located. And so the question here is whether we are just in a brief lull and things are going to continue in a positive way, or frankly whether they will reverse themselves in a serious way. And I think that's, I think, an important question for us to possibly talk about later. The report also, I think, confirms what, again, a lot of analysis has already discussed in terms of the sort of constituent elements of peace, what makes a peaceful society, its democratic forms of governments, vibrant economies, the role of law, the type of economic growth, how equitable it is. All these are, I think, indisputable elements that make up for peaceful societies. Conversely, what makes countries most at risk, the nature of its governance, whether it's a sort of hybrid system particularly, also, I think, is borne out in the report. And I think this is clear to see in terms of the ranking of countries across the whole index, so you're seeing some fairly obvious ones at the top end and some fairly obvious ones at the bottom end. So what doesn't the global peace index tell us? I think, number one, it really doesn't capture, I think, what has been a recent deterioration in the nature of relations amongst the great powers. We've seen this, obviously, most recently in between Russia, Ukraine, and the United States and the EU. We've also seen it with China, particularly in terms of the various territorial disputes in the East China Sea, in the South China Sea. Even Sino-Indian relations, I think, there's been an uptick in tensions there. So that's something I think we also have to be cognizant of. It really doesn't capture more of the various threats of international, interstate violence that are out there. I've mentioned some of them already in Northeast Asia. There's clearly the long-standing threat from North Korea. Japan and China have been in various militarized confrontations over these territorial disputes in the East China Sea, relations even between Japan and South Korea have deteriorated as well. South Asia, India, Pakistan, some signs of improvement, but we all know how fragile that relationship is. Afghanistan and Pakistan, a lot of people concerned about the deterioration of that relationship once the U.S. forces withdraw from Afghanistan. I don't think anyone would say we're out of the woods yet between Israel and Iran either. So I think there are a lot of places where we should be concerned about interstate violence in the near term and the longer term, which brings me to discussion of the U.S. role. And I find that the index kind of penalizes or doesn't acknowledge, frankly, the role of the U.S. as a contributor of peace around the world and the various elements that it brings to that contribution in, if anything, a way negatively on its overall score. And if you look at where the U.S. stands in the GPI, and you can go to page six of the report, and the U.S. is good old in the 101st position and looking at some of the countries that have better GPI scores, I have to sort of question how those scores actually were produced. So evidently, we're behind Equatorial Guinea, Liberia, Saudi Arabia, Sierra Leone, Jordan, Q8. These I would not say, and maybe I'm not understanding the methodology correctly, are net contributors to peace or more peaceful societies than the United States. I'll get onto that in a little bit in a moment. I think the report captures the relative change over previous years as sort of indicators of risk, but doesn't, I don't think, captures absolute risk of instability and conflict. So the 10 countries that are considered most at risk, and again, you can look at it here, Zambia, Haiti, Argentina, Chad, Bosnia, Nepal, Burundi, Georgia, Liberia, and Qatar. Now, if we did an informal poll here, I'm not sure that many of us would have listed those. I think most of us probably would have put down Jordan, Lebanon, Libya, Central Africa Republic, Afghanistan, Iraq, Ukraine, and maybe even Thailand. So I wonder about this, and it's a little odd to me that some countries that are listed as most at risk, Burundi and Georgia are also countries that have fallen, sorry, have improved recently. So there seems to be a bit of a mixed message there in my mind. So I get the sense that some indicators tend to be magnified in terms of the methodology. If you look at the United States, the incarceration rate is clearly a major driver of the U.S. score. Curiously, the level of gun violence, which I think we're all concerned about, doesn't seem to get mentioned, yet the single terrorist act in Boston seemingly drove down the whole score for North America, which seems a little odd. Meanwhile, other factors are underestimated, and I can look at some countries that score higher than the U.S., say Greece and Hungary, for instance, where the level of right-wing extremism, right-wing violence has increased quite significantly in the last year or so, yet somehow is not captured here, the recent coup in Thailand, too. So let me just wrap up quickly with what's the value of this. As I said, I think it's always good to encourage more rigorous assessments of the sources of peace and conflict. As an early warning tool for either early preventive action, I think the utility here is mixed. It does point to certain countries that would not intuitively be on our, I think, top 10 list, which could conceivably trigger deeper dives in terms of what is it about these societies that are showing up in this analysis, and so I think that that's always helpful. But if, at the same time, it really doesn't point to the countries that I think most of us would be most concerned about, then it tends to, I think, sort of undermine itself. As policy prescriptive tool, again, I think it's useful in pointing to some of the main elements of peaceful societies. It doesn't tell us which of those to emphasize over others, the sequencing of certainly certain policy initiatives, and so on. So maybe that's asking more than it really is designed to do. So overall, I would say, as an aid to policy makers, it has sort of mixed value. Thank you. Thanks very much, Paul. Before we move on to Gary, I'd like Albert to just respond briefly to some of the questions about the methodology. Yeah, I'll make it very brief. Paul, I think you've raised some good points, and any index, I think, needs to be examined closely, and there are choices that index creators make that have implications. Just quickly comment on two points that Paul made. The U.S. So it is jarring to see the United States at 101. It's fallen three places from last year, mostly driven by events like the terrorism attack in Boston. It's just fallen a little bit, but as Paul points out, an event like the Boston terrorist attack can send a country down in places. When we talk about military expenditures, we're not making a moral judgment about whether it's right or wrong for the United States to serve as the world's policeman. I think what we're trying to say is that the U.S. really is an outlier in these extraordinary ways, and there's no doubt about it. The U.S. spends a considerable amount of money supporting its military. The U.S. does have 25 percent of the world's incarceration population. The U.S. does spend a lot of money on violence containment. And I think that's an appropriate question to ask what the benefits and costs of that are. The second point that Paul mentioned, I think it's interesting for him to point out that many of the countries that we identify at risk of falling in peace are countries that are already fairly high up in the Global Peace Index rankings and are not the type of countries that you would normally think of as being in a crisis situation. I would actually argue that's an advantage of the Global Peace Index because I think it makes logical sense that in our world we are attracted to the countries that appear to be either about to fall off the cliff or on the cliff, but we don't pay as much attention to countries that are doing pretty well but are at risk of falling and experiencing problems in peacefulness. And I think that's, in a sense, what an index which is less kind of expert-driven and is about taking a step back and analyzing using a data-driven approach. That's a complementary approach and I think that's a totally legitimate purpose that the Global Peace Index serves. Thanks very much. I'm sure we're going to get to more discussion of some of these same issues. So I'd like to move on to Gary Milante who's directs to work on macroeconomics of security for the Stockholm Institute for the Stockholm International Peace Research Institute, SIPRI. I always confuse the eyes. I also formerly have the World Bank and was the economist and lead author for the 2011 World Development Report on Conflict Security and Development, which as you know is the Bible and the intellectual basis from which all future work on conflict will take place. Gary. Thank you, thank you. I'm hoping it becomes the Old Testament. We always want new research, right? We want to be pushing forward. So I'd like to see the next one coming. Thanks to CSIS for having me here and thanks to the Global Peace Index for inviting me to comment. They know because I've commented on this before and I've been in conversations with David and other people from IEP that I'm not a kind commenter. So I will try to be generous but also critical at the same time. The IEP produces this report and now this is seven years. So this is becoming an institution and it's something that I think is very valuable. It's a valuable institution that's being built and I applaud them for producing this annually and doing the rigorous work that needs to be done to be able to bring this really disparate data sources, be able to bring in some kind of assessments that are of high quality, bring in an advisory panel and form the approach and build this over time. That is a tremendous contribution that they're making. So the comments that follow, though they may sound critical, are in light of this positive contribution that they're making to our global discussion about peace and security and in my case, security and development. So congratulations to them on producing it. It's very timely because of the post-2015 discussions talking about Millennium Development Goals and peace building and state building indicators, thinking about the next 15 years of development goals and how we're going to be agenda-setting for that and how we might include some reflections on some of these issues in there. I disagree that it's a cross-cutting thing. I think that there should be actual goals that demonstrate that we're interested and we think these are important issues that need to be measured. And the GPI shows that it can be done. We can collect annual data for many of these countries at the macro level that can be reported upon and we can show progress over time. So this is a great proof of concept for that. The challenge is, and this is the framing comment for my following comments, the challenge for this is that there's no objective measure. If we're talking about it scientifically, and this is a social science and we want to do a real inquiry, there's no objective measure of peace that they can put on the left-hand side and then take these great indicators that they collect and they assemble on the right-hand side and then check to see whether those are real or not or whether they actually predict or are correlated or are related to the thing that they're trying to measure or trying to estimate. And that's because we don't have that measure. It would be great if we had that left-hand side measure and we could really say this country is really more peaceful and it's correlated on these 20 indicators, but we don't have that. There's no way for us to be able to do that. They have provided a vision of what peace is and that's really how you should take it. This is a construction from the Institute for Economics and Peace about how you assemble peace and all the various component parts of it and what can be measured and then how you weight those things, both internal and external, all those different things. But some of my comments are going to be directed at weighting. And we could probably talk about that weighting forever. That could be years that we could discuss that weighting. But they've provided one measure. I think one of the great things that they do is put all their data online. If you want to create a different vision of peace, you can go on there and collect it all. I was trying to think of what the analog is. Originally I was thinking, well, it's like car parts or it's like IKEA sending you a kit. Not IKEA. I'm from Stockholm now, so I have to say IKEA. But I actually think it's more like a buffet or a salad bar, right? And so the value you should take away from it and I hope that you'll dig deep and there's lots of young folks here with lots of time and all those computing skills and power that we now have. Go in and take that data and do your own kind of analysis and assessment because there are lots of parts in here and I think the value is much more in the parts than it is in some of the... I think some of the... there are problems with some of the indexing issues and I'll get to that in a second. All right, so I have to move quickly. So that was my parts conversation. I do think one of the values that it has right now is also the measuring of violence over time. It does allow us to talk in some way about whether we are more peaceful or less peaceful every year. But as a global community is extremely valuable to us and I think the headline of this is really interesting and important right now because if you've been studying conflict or violence over the last couple of years, you actually have started to buy that headline that we are more peaceful now than we were 20 years ago. But if you look at the trends, even on civil wars and interstate and entrusted conflict, it turned out that most of our gains from that were in the 90s. We had this drop-off on conflicts and then we had a basic plateau, maybe even recently a recent increase. So we're resting on our laurels for the last 10 years saying that we're more peaceful. We're really... that was a lot of gains in the 90s and we haven't really significantly improved upon recently. So this is... I think there's a good question of that that kind of pushes that question forward. All right, now let's dive into some of the issues. On Mil-X, on military expenditures, I think there's... a lot of these questions are going to raise my challenge to you, which is, I think we need a framework. You've established, you've got all the data, you've got the system, you're producing this annually. Now we need a nice paper that says this is the framework and this is how we think the world is and how these things relate to each other. Military expenditure is one example, I think, where it's not entirely clear what the relationship is, should be, and how it should be interpreted here. In some countries it is absolutely vital to them for their security that they spend more or that they increase their military in some way, that they improve their security in some way. So having more police on the ground or having more type of trained police improving the quality of their personnel or improving the capacities that they have is vital to providing security. But right now any of those things that I've just described would count against you on the index, on the peace index. There are some countries where corruption is so rife and there's such a disconnect between what military expenditure is and or the number of personnel and the actual outputs of security that it doesn't matter what happens to this number really in one way or another. It will have almost zero effect on whether or not people are more secure, the citizens are more secure, the state is more secure. So in those cases this number is meaningless almost, right? So it shouldn't enter into it. In other cases, yes, if they increase the level of military personnel and military expenditures they are actually reducing the amount of security often because it's used for oppression. So there are three different pathways that I've just described quickly that should be expanded into some kind of methodological framework that unpacks this better and understands it better. Same thing with arms transfers. It's not the same to call arms transfers from some countries who don't regulate or control or in any way kind of monitor how those weapons are being used. The same as arms transfers from some western countries that produce weapons, monitor those systems. There are also obviously the strategic effects and the peacekeeping effects. There are global goods that are produced by some military activities, military expenditures, and those global goods are contributed to by having additional arms transfers often of strategic nature coming from individual countries, often through alliances, et cetera. So they can't be counted the same way. An arms transfer from China to Pakistan is not the same as an arms transfer from Sweden to Turkey. Those are not the same thing, but right now they're counted the same way. And that raises the whole issue of indexing. And that's why, again, I don't want you to just take the number and go and repeat the number, please. This is a buffet. It's a salad bar. Unpack it. Look at the pieces. Choose your own salad bar and buffet. But don't just take the plate as it comes out. And this is where indexing issues get into it, and I won't spend a lot of time on it, but there's a great paper by Francisco Gutierrez and then who has looked at indexes and all the things that go wrong with indexes and says this is the problem with comparing and kind of aggregating everything into one number. So you have to be really careful and how you interpret it. Here's three examples. One, according to this index, if I move 200 people, or if I move the same number of people from being in prison to being police, I will be just as secure. Because the weights on the number of jailed and the weights on the number of police personnel and actually the denominator, it's very convenient for me to be able to make this example, are the same. So it's one to one. If I move 200 people, 5,000 people, 100,000 people out of prison and make them into police, I will be just as secure. Obviously the training matters. But the problem is here that you're doing, anytime you have an index, as soon as you start to have two numbers in some way, you're running into a problem with trying to make them equivalent in some way. And that's again where we need a framework that's going to unpack this. We need a bunch of grad students and researchers that are out there that are saying, well, how many police does it take to produce this level of security or produce these types of outputs in security? Same thing with military expenditures and security, instability, security. And then there are issues within the index and when you're aggregating numbers, Francisco talks at length about it and I'll direct you to him about cardinal measures versus ordinal measures. So we have some cardinal measures that are introduced here that are part of the qualitative assessment, organized conflict, political instability and access to small arms, all of which a move of one on that scale, a move from two to three is not the same as a move from three to four. Those numbers are not equivalent, but they end up having an same effect on an averaging effect when you get into an index. So those are all signals that I just want to highlight or if you have time this summer, perhaps you would like to write a paper about it. Then we get into prediction and I think prediction is this messy area. We all want it, but it's extremely difficult to do. I'd be much happier to see in here or in another paper if you want to get more technical. The whole layout of type one and type two errors, exactly what you would expect from your two different models, how they work together and how you think the world can be predicted from that. But I think part of the issue and part of what Paul talked to is the issue that we're actually conflating as soon as we turn it into two indexes now, that we have the positive piece index and the global piece index and they use those nicely. I really like that concept, but they need to unpack it more. They use those two together to be able to predict what the types of countries are that are kind of outliers that we should be looking at. The interesting thing about those is that they're conflating security in general, so I don't know exactly when I look at one of those countries whether I should be expecting violent protests, whether I should be expecting political instability, whether I should be expecting civil war, or I should be expecting them to declare war on the neighbor. And those are very different types of security or insecurity. So we need to... It would be better, again, to have the framework to unpack it and then say these are the causal paths and this is how we think the relationship works there. And then that's falsifiable. Then you can unpack that. And lastly, I think it may be time to move... I love the EIU and I love that you have them working on this and it's fantastic that they contribute on this. But there's some of these qualitative assessments that are established and our expectations on you are changing and increasing and you're this institution now. But some of these probably need to move past qualitative assessments from EIU, for example, on political instability, on whether or not people feel safe as far as crime goes. There now are the world value surveys, there's the barometers, there are questions that are being asked. We should at least be testing to see whether those can be used as alternatives for that. So I'll stop there and I can go on much longer during any question and answer. Thanks very much, Gary. Alexandra Toma is the Executive Director of the Peace and Security Funders Group, formerly of the ConnectUS Fund and the Ploughshares Fund, teaches at George Washington University's Elliott School of International Affairs. When most people think about funders, they see money. When you look at a funder, what you should see is knowledge that they're engaging with the knowledge that exists but actually what they're mainly engaging with in the day-to-day lives is the knowledge that's about to exist. And so they're much more of a fascinating source for what's happening on the cutting edge of research than most people who see dollar signs in their eyes give credit for it. So Alexandra, please. Thanks, Bob. One of these is not like the others on the panel. Clearly it's because I work with funders and I'm not at a think tank. So I've been asked to comment from that perspective. What I wanted to... And I really enjoyed Gary's and Paul's remarks and the index is fascinating. But what I can add here is exactly what Bob was saying, which is the funder's perspective and the philanthropist's perspective on the index and how we might use this. So I'd like to just... And I'll keep my comments brief because I recognize some people in the audience and I know we have a lot of knowledge there as well. So I'll be brief. What I think is most interesting to funders is revolves around a Ben Franklin quote from centuries ago, which is an ounce of prevention is worth a pound of cure. So it's very interesting that we're citing $9.8 trillion per year or what struck me was it's 11.3% of the global GDP. I'm curious to hear, well, if it takes to contain violence and conflict, what does it cost to prevent conflict? And I'm sure the number is a lot lower, perhaps. And that would be interesting to explore further and I'm not sure how you get at that quantitatively but there must be some way. So coming off of that, the Peace and Security Funders group, this network of funders and philanthropists that I run, they're about 60 folks in my network. They fund about $300 million a year on a range of conflict and national security issues. Just recently, because they're sick and tired of always coming in at the end and cleaning messes up investing in conflict resolution, a lot of the funders have gotten together and said, well, we're going to form a conflict and atrocities prevention working group in partnership with the international human rights funders. So one of the most important things that they're looking at is just that, the prevention. And so therefore, the most interesting part of the report for me was someone in the middle, so don't stop reading after page 10. Head out to page 55. I know it's a lot to read but it's actually quite fascinating when you're starting to look at the country risk. And perhaps there are some challenges with that but I think it starts to show a little bit where we might focus from a donor's perspective, so that's what I would entice everyone to dig a little bit deeper into the report starting from page 55 onwards. So three things that struck me with the funder hat on is the first is that 500 million people live in the most conflict-prone countries with 200 million of them living below the poverty line. That's a lot, a lot of people. And how do we get to those people? How do we help those people? What can we do to invest in empowering those institutions now? The second thing that struck me and we were kind of dancing around it a little bit and I'm curious actually, I wanted to pull the audience. How many of you that came in here and got this beautiful report sort of went and saw and went to this page and saw and looked at, you know, where's the U.S.? Is that the first thing you did? Who did that? And did you try and find your own home country? I'm Romanian, so I was like, oh, where's Romania on here? We're not doing too well. That's the problem is that it's the countries we go towards, it's the countries that are sort of sexy. Where's Syria? Where's South Sudan? Where's Pakistan? Where's Afghanistan? It's not the countries that aren't in the news and we've danced around this. So one of my mentors at grad school said if it bleeds, it leads which is that if it's bleeding if there's a country that's hot and sexy, that's what we're going to focus on. It's the shiny ball syndrome and that's the problem. How do we sell how do we sell prevention? Bosnia, Herzegovina, Argentina how do we sell that if it's not in the papers every day? How do we get folks to really focus on these countries that are on the sort of precipice? So that struck me. A third thing that struck me and again it's a little bit further into the report on page 64 is the Pillars of Peace and David talked about that at length so I won't but I think that's sort of almost a hit list of prescriptions on where we can start investing where funders, donors whether it's private philanthropists or funders that I work with whether it's the various governments or IFC, the World Bank, etc. That's, I think, an interesting place to start looking at how do we uphold some of these eight pillars? What would we do to invest in corruption, transparency free flow of information? Is that the media? Do we need to support more independent media? What does that mean? So that was an interesting part in terms of the funder's perspective and then there was one other little thing but both Paul and Gary mentioned it if you know me I like to be a little bit controversial and but you stole my fire. I was going to say you know America there's the gun violence and so the one terrorist event versus gun violence that happens almost daily it seems now as a psych major undergrad that kind of that struck me as a gun violence psychologically what are the psychological and again how do you quantify this I'm not sure but what are the psychological ramifications of the gun violence of the society where we hear this day in and day out and then the second this is maybe a little too controversial is Israel. Are you looking at the West Bank it seems to me that Israel in here when I read it was like oh this is a nice happy place to live and I've been there several times and it is it's beautiful but then you kind of go over onto the other side of the wall and it's not the nice happy place and that's it's right there I mean they're married and so I'm curious how you looked at that and what that all and thanks. Thank you very much I think what I'll do is I'll give David and Aubrey just a couple of minutes each to respond to some of the things that have been put on the table and then I would like to open it up to a few questions before we end and we only have about 15 minutes left in the discussion so Aubrey would you like to start? Yeah I'll make it real brief first I'll start with some of the points that Gary made and I'll just focus on two one is Gary will be happy to know that we plan to build the buffet or the IKEA furniture or however you want to analogize it one of our goals in the future is to put our risk tool online and the calculations that we make online so that people can in fact do their own versions of the calculations and I think that's really important for kind of driving a process of continuous improvement of indices another quick point Gary's right to say that we should try to move from qualitative to quantitative indicators and so just as an example terrorism we now use a quantitative score based on data that's provided to us by the Start Center at the University of Maryland so we are moving in that direction Okay thanks again for the panelists in there the comments all very very good points and just to pick some I mean peace what Gary said about the definition of peace and what peace means it can be contested and it's one of those things that peace is a very prolific word in the English language but if you ask people what it is they define it by what it's not so it's an interesting area to work in really but just in terms of some of the sort of more technical issues I mean part of the art of this is that the world is not set up to be experiments for scientific risk prediction and so we're limited to things that have happened which you know gives us a very small subset to work with which is very annoying for an analyst but you know so we are limited to a certain number of things that we can look at as examples of the things that we're saying and so a lot of the stuff that we do is just based on this sort of analysis of things that we know have happened in the past which again makes it you can sort of debate theories but you know in terms of just building an evidence space that's what we're trying to do so in terms of the other thing about risk Gary is correct in saying that the countries that are listed there will have their own individual risks and they will be different from each other as I said in the presentation we in preparation for this report actually developed a number of models that did look at what characteristics countries that have civil uprisings have what characteristics do countries that have civil wars have and they're all different characteristics so in terms of the actual risk work in its entirety we would unpack it properly but in terms of producing the report we just limited it to those two examples another couple of points of clarification Paul's comment about what the GPI doesn't capture which is a very good observation but just a couple of points of clarification in the index itself we do try and capture relations with neighbors and declining relations with neighbors and also in the positive peace index we look at good relations with neighbors so we do try and capture some aspect factors and just finally in terms of Alex I'm very happy with what you said about trying to get donors to to fund prevention the whole point of this is really to look in the longer term part of the problem with getting interest in prevention is how do you communicate even when it's a success because what you have to do is you say okay well this is what we spent on the proposal or the project and if it's a success nothing happens so how do you communicate the counterfactual how do you put a price on your cost benefit analysis and that's actually what we're trying to bridge at the moment it's very difficult we see debates and climate change it's very difficult argument to go across but we should just keep on trying thank you so we have a little bit of time unfortunately not for manifestos or speeches only for short concise questions so if you'll kindly raise your hand briefly identify yourself ask a question just a question I'm going to take three questions and then open it up to the full panel and that is probably what we'll have time to do so fire away we'll have a microphone if you could we're being live streamed on the internet so they won't hear you if you're not talking to the microphone hi I'm Sally Kaplan from the student peace alliance and peace alliance organization I'm interested in any analysis that you did or the value of an analysis in like infrastructures or ministries or institutions for peace or peace building such as USIP in the united states the value of that I'm excited at all thanks very much we're going to get two more questions on the table in the back please Robert Treta international investor I was looking and perhaps I just didn't find it but I see where you do try to track the economic impact and total expenditures when it comes to I guess military and other means here is there a trend in that respect is there housing or falling worldwide thanks let's just get another question if we could I'm Ann Gaylor former foreign service officer I was wondering how do you or how do you attempt to take into account cultural factors Alexandra was talking about the psychology of things how you deal with that I think would make a lot of difference in the index are there any further questions just in case okay okay well I might just address the last question first in terms of cultural factors what we what we're doing is working with people who do actually do research in those so I was just recently at a conference in the Netherlands with a group of anthropologists that have studied what makes peaceful societies over history and have lived and worked with these people and there are certain cultural factors that are that appear to be consistent with a wide number of peaceful societies so I mean and they're not very that not surprising but I mean it's about cooperation it's about essentially going from power to a more societal view of success so we have looked at those cultural factors the issue with being able to measure that is that it comes down to surveys which are very expensive so what we're actually doing is having a look at what's the the most effective way of commissioning such surveys whether it's teaming up with people who already do it, doing our own so we're actually looking at that because part of when you're looking at something like this you're talking about big massive macroeconomic you know country wide data which is not really going to tell you too much about the cultural factors but we're trying to address that more in our positive peace stuff and we're going to try and get more timely data in terms of ways so we're trying to address that so just quick responses to the other two questions I'm going to make another tortured analogy which is that this report kind of builds the framework of the house but the real issue is how do you build the rooms within the house and how do you drill down to some of the analysis and some of the questions that we heard were I think about drilling down a very interesting question about what the impact is of peace building institutions like USIP around the world this report doesn't answer that question but I think it's an interesting direction to take the positive peace index if the idea is building the strength of institutions and changing attitudes how much of that has to come from investments internal to that country and how much can come outside of that country and what are the interplays between that that's an interesting question is it a dollar spent by an institution within the country to build their own country's positive pillars of peace a more effective dollar spent then by an outside institution we had a question about the economic cost of violence containment we do show that we're spending more on violence containment again an increase of 4% over the last year but in some of our other research we've been able to drill down and show just how strong the relationship is between violence in the one hand and declining economic performance and peace and improved economic performance just Mexico as a brief example we've done an analysis of Mexico called the Mexico peace index we've done it we did it last year and we're going to do it again that compares the 32 states of Mexico to each other and we know for example that the 5 most peaceful states in Mexico in 2003 had 20% higher GDP per capita than the least peaceful by the end of the decade we also know that on average the most peaceful quartile of Mexican states had more than double the rate of economic growth in 2011 than the least peaceful states so just as we're showing that if you compare countries to one another there are wide variations in their economic performance based on their underlying peaceful condition if you look within a country the differences are in some cases even more pronounced Have you ever discussed in 70 any thoughts on what's been raised here I could add my two cents here one question on trends in military expenditures I think it's important to look at that over time I think Cipri is probably the talking of old testaments the one that has done the most sort of long standing work in this area but I think unless the is augmented by some qualitative analysis then it's not that helpful as Gary mentioned increased expenditure on internal security for some countries is a positive good other types of military expenditures whether it's sort of destabilizing weapon systems that are clearly worrisome to neighbors that's arguably a negative so we've got to balance it on the role of peace building institutions if I've understood you correctly I think we've got to be careful of not mixing apples and oranges here you know some peace building institutions are primarily focused on trying to mitigate instability and conflict within a particular society and I can think of famous case of the infrastructure for peace and Ghana is lauded in very effective US Institute of Peace has a very different role it's not really about addressing fact it's constitutionally prohibited from dealing with internal issues in the US so again we've got to be very careful about aggregating the role of these different institutions that play a role in promoting peace getting better data and analysis on issues of peace and conflict is going to be I think increasingly important over the next years not just for the peace and conflict world but for international development and trade and finance as well because there seems to be and some of what you've shown on the polarization of the risers and fallers seems to be consistent with the overall trend that what progress is being made in international development worldwide does not seem to be applying to a subset of countries that are being left behind are increasingly in places where there's recently been conflict and so there's a group of fragile societies that are unable to break the cycle, unable to break out of it the rest of the world is in a way leaving them behind and I think as the new millennium development goals are defined next year as international development work proceeds over time understanding how to make improvements on a wide range of issues is going to be increasingly important in fragile and conflict societies which are the places where it's hardest not just to operate but also to understand so I think that the global peace index and the work of SIPRI and other institutions like that including my own who are increasingly trying to figure out how to understand and how to improve the situation on the ground in these incredibly complex environments is going to be increasingly important to our interests so I'd like to thank the Institute for Economics and Peace and all three of our discussants for coming here today you should put on your calendars October 21st we're doing a rather significant conference here at CSIS looking at what the next 20 years of peace and conflict and political transitions are likely to look like it's resilience and political transitions that we're doing in partnership with the Office of Transition Initiatives at USAID before then you should go to economicsandpeace.org or visionofhumanity.org to download the 2014 global peace index play with their data feast yourselves on the buffet and thanks for coming today and have a great summer